Killer Colt Read online

  When Whiting objected to this line of questioning, Selden appealed to Judge Kent. “I do not wish to lacerate the feelings of the friends of Mr. Adams by saying anything against his character or general conduct,” Selden said in kindly tones. “I would not harrow the breasts of those attached to the unfortunate deceased whose bones have now been committed to the dust by even insinuating anything against him. Nevertheless, if we can show that he had exhibited a strong temper when endeavoring on another occasion to collect money, we have a right to do so.”

  After briefly considering the matter, Kent ruled in Selden’s favor, declaring “that a man’s temper could, under these circumstances, be shown.” Selden then repeated his question to Post.

  “Mr. Adams had a confab with Mr. Ransom,” the merchant answered. “He seemed to be angry because Mr. Ransom didn’t have the money to pay him. He told Mr. Ransom he believed he meant to swindle him out of his debt.”

  Had Adams said anything else? Selden asked.

  Post allowed that he had, then repeated Adams’s words: “ ‘Everybody is trying to cheat me.’ ”1

  • • •

  Before court was adjourned for the day, the mystery of the missing lid was finally solved, laying to rest the rumors that it had been sold to a dime museum, perhaps by the city watchman, H. Patrick. The answer was provided by another watchman, Benjamin Lewen, who revealed that a month or so earlier, he and a coworker named Ball had been on duty at the watchhouse during a particularly frigid evening. No coal had yet been laid up for the winter, so they went searching for “anything we could make a fire with.” Seeing the lid inside the cell—and finding the door open—they had taken it, split it into kindling, and used it to build a fire.

  Ball, who took the stand next, confirmed Lewen’s story and added a detail that left no doubt that the wooden object the two men had incinerated was the lid of the infamous packing crate. “It smelled strong at first,” said Ball, “but even stronger when we put it in the fire.”2

  36

  Dr. Gilman’s testimony concerning the small, clean hole behind the corpse’s left ear had raised a possibility that the prosecution was eager to explore: that the killing of Samuel Adams was a premeditated crime committed with a pistol. Colt, in this scenario, had “planned the encounter in advance and armed himself accordingly.”1 True, neither Asa Wheeler nor his student had heard a gunshot. But the district attorney felt he could account for that anomaly.

  In the years before the development of self-contained cartridges, Colt’s revolvers operated by cap and ball. Each chamber of the revolving cylinder was loaded with a charge of gunpowder and a lead ball. A small percussion cap containing a highly combustible compound was then affixed to a nipple on the back end of each chamber. When struck by the hammer, the cap would explode, igniting the powder inside the chamber, which propelled the bullet through the gun barrel.

  It was, of course, the detonated gunpowder that produced the loudest bang. What Whiting proposed to show was that a man could be killed by a pistol loaded with a cap and ball, but no gunpowder: that the percussion cap alone could “explode with sufficient force to drive a ball into a man’s head without making enough noise to be heard in the next room.”2

  Dudley Selden had objected on technical grounds to the introduction of any evidence concerning a firearm. The indictment, he argued, made no mention of any weapon except a hatchet. On Tuesday morning, however, Judge Kent began by ruling in favor of the district attorney—thus opening the way for some of the most remarkable scenes ever witnessed in an American courtroom.

  • • •

  Recalled to the stand as the day’s first witness, Asa Wheeler confirmed that John Colt did, in fact, keep a pistol on the premises. As Wheeler recollected, on the evening of September 13, just four days before Samuel Adams’s disappearance,

  Colt came into my room after school was over, and in the course of our conversation he spoke of his brother. I asked him if his brother was the inventor of the patent pistol bearing his name. He replied that he was and asked me if I had ever seen any of his pistols. I said that I had not. He said he had one in his room and would let me see it. He went and got one and returned with it to my room. It was a very elegant weapon with a beautiful pearl handle and a very ingenious way of firing with a cylinder. It had his brother’s name on it as the maker, I think. At any rate, he said it was his brother’s.

  Wheeler spent about fifteen minutes examining and handling the weapon. He never saw it again, though “after the discovery of the murder” he had immediately “thought of the pistol.”

  Grilled closely by Dudley Selden about the dimensions and workmanship of the gun, Wheeler acknowledged that he did “not know much about firearms—I know more about bookkeeping.” He proceeded to prove the point with a comment that elicited a prolonged outburst of laughter from the spectators. Asked about the gun’s cocking mechanism, Wheeler was at a loss to describe it. “But there was certainly a cock to that pistol,” he declared, to the general merriment of the courtroom.3

  The consul general of France, a gentleman named Charles de la Forest, was next on the stand. Monsieur de la Forest testified that he had purchased two particularly fine specimens of Colt’s pocket pistols for the Prince de Joinville, who was then visiting the United States aboard the French navy frigate the Belle Poule (the ship that, sixteen months earlier, had transported Napoléon’s remains from St. Helena back to France). Eager to try out his new acquisitions, the prince had fired one of the pistols on deck.

  “When merely propelled by a cap,” the consul testified, “the ball was sent one hundred fifty or one hundred sixty feet, struck a hard board, dented it, and rebounded ten or twelve feet. At a distance of twelve paces, again with a cap alone and no powder, the ball went through a book of about one hundred fifty pages and two thick covers. The noise was very trifling, like the cracking of a whip.”

  An assistant alderman named Charles A. Underwood agreed with de la Forest’s characterization of the noise made by Colt’s pistol when fired with a cap only. Though Underwood had never handled one of the revolvers himself, he had often visited the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company store on Broadway and had “seen there a ball sent from a Colt’s pocket pistol, with a cap alone, the distance of twenty-five or thirty feet and half embedded in a board. I consider this Colt’s pistol the very perfection in firearms.”4

  The prosecution’s final witness was James Short, the “humble, broken-down son of Erin” from the city poorhouse who had been enlisted to wash Adams’s decomposed body at the Dead House. “A miserable, nondescript-looking character, four feet high” (in the typically blunt words of James Gordon Bennett), Short recalled that there were “some bones laying loose” inside Adams’s shattered skull. One of the pieces was “about the breadth of two fingers,” the others slightly smaller. After removing and washing them, he had “given them to the doctors,” who had laid them aside on a table. Later, after the autopsy was concluded and the body placed in a coffin and taken to the cemetery, Short discovered that the skull fragments were still there, so “I wrapped them in a piece of paper and ran down to the burying ground just in time to put them in the grave.”

  “That will be all, Mr. Short,” said Dudley Selden at the end of his cross-examination. “You may step down.”

  “Yes, and I am glad of it,” Short said as he rose from the chair, “for it’s a very bad business, and that’s a fact.”5

  • • •

  A few minutes later, the prosecution having rested its case, John A. Morrill—by all accounts the most smooth-spoken of Colt’s three attorneys—stepped to the front of the courtroom to make the opening argument for the defense.

  “Gentlemen of the jury,” he intoned, “it now becomes the duty of the counsel for the prisoner—their solemn duty—to enter more minutely into the examination of the evidence which has been produced against the unfortunate individual who stands before you, a young man just entering into life who has no friend around him but a brother—who is
deprived by misfortune of the presence of his father. You know where his mother is, and also where are his beloved sisters.

  “While you have sympathy for him, I must admit that you must also feel the loss sustained by the widow of Mr. Adams, one who has been bereaved by the loss of a tender and affectionate husband. The people ask that the laws shall be fairly administered, but while they do so, are sometimes carried away, and without thought will condemn an individual unheard. But the jury must lay aside these feelings—must lay aside feelings not only for the unfortunate prisoner but for Mrs. Adams and for public prejudice. You must take hold of the case with clear, dispassionate minds, remembering to blend with justice the attributes of mercy.”

  Following this prefatory plea for impartiality—laced with a heart-tugging allusion to the defendant’s tragic family history—Morrill allowed a note of righteous indignation to enter his voice as he “complained of the new charge thrown upon them, of the life of the deceased having been taken by a pistol instead of by a hatchet, as mentioned in the indictment.” He then went on to insist that if the jurors had “any doubt whether it was murder or manslaughter or justifiable homicide,” they were legally bound to give the prisoner the benefit of the doubt.

  He continued:

  Let us see if there is any evidence that Adams was murdered by John C. Colt. Has it been shown that there was an appointment, or even an allusion to an appointment on that day? Had Adams ever complained of Colt or has any bad feeling been shown between them? On the contrary, the best disposition existed between them, continued money transactions took place, and they were on the kindest and best of terms.

  Had John C. Colt intended to murder Adams, would he do it in a room adjoining Wheeler’s, when he knew his students and himself were engaged, where persons were continually? Would it be the felon’s desire at such a time and under such circumstances, when detection was certain, to take a life? He must have been mad to do so. But thank God, we set up no insanity in this case, and the proposition shows the falsity on its face.

  Having thus disposed of widespread rumors that the defense planned to mount an insanity plea, Morrill proceeded to sketch out the line of argument that he and his cocounsel intended to follow.

  “In regard to the idea of premeditated murder, where is the motive? Where is the malice? Where is the bad intention of the prisoner? Some papers even went so far as to accuse the prisoner of purchasing articles for boxing up the deceased and salting him down,” Morrill said, throwing a pointed glance at James Gordon Bennett, who was seated not far from him in the area reserved for the newspapermen. “We can show that, so far from having purchased those articles in advance, he already had them in his possession.”

  Indeed, said Morrill, despite the absence of an eyewitness, the defense was prepared to prove that the murder was not merely unpremeditated but justified. “No person saw Adams and Colt together except the Great God himself,” he declared. “No person saw Colt and Adams together in that room. But there are providential circumstances which will show that there never was premeditation on his part but that he was acting in a way to protect himself according to the laws of the God of Nature. We will show that the blows were such as could only have been given in self-defense.”

  After addressing and dismissing several other points suggested by the prosecution—including the possibility that Colt had killed Adams for his gold pocket watch—Morrill turned to what he knew would be the critical issue for the jury: the chillingly methodical way that Colt had attempted to conceal his crime, and the ghastly treatment to which Adams’s corpse had been subjected.

  “Gentlemen,” Morrill declared, looking each juror in the eye in turn. “In relation to the degrees of crime, you are to hold continually in your mind that you are bound to separate the actual homicide from the subsequent conduct of the prisoner. He might, overcome by excitement, have committed the deed and afterward found it necessary to conceal the body as Moses did the African when he had killed him—he thought it would be best to place him out of the way.

  “No man under similar circumstances can tell how he would act. If he were as brave as Julius Caesar, he might say, ‘I will put him in the box, I will use stratagem, I will conceal it.’ But it is for you to weigh how the act itself was done. I will show you one act as to John C. Colt. They say in public prints that he was a hard-hearted man—everything bad and crude. But I will show that he was kind to the poor, always ready to do good, and has borne the character of one of the mildest and one of the best dispositioned men almost in this community.”

  After likening John to Moses and extolling him as a model of both Christian charity and civic virtue, Morrill closed with a humble assertion of faith in the jury’s rectitude and fair-mindedness.

  “Gentlemen, John C. Colt, poor and friendless, a fellow citizen, comes before you charged with a crime. He comes before you in defense of that life which is dear to all. He asks you to mete out to him justice. It is all he asks; it is all we ask. We seek but one thing—it is that he may have mercy according to law—and if he has such, we have no doubt that he will find a safe deliverance in your hand.”

  With that, Morrill reseated himself, while his cocounsel Dudley Selden rose and called the prisoner’s first witness, whose testimony, in James Gordon Bennett’s estimation, would “represent one of the most remarkable features of any trial ever known.”6

  37

  Carrying a pair of slender wooden cases, the witness, Samuel Colt, stepped to the front of the courtroom. Asked to identify himself, he replied that, in addition to being the defendant’s brother, he was “the inventor of Colt’s patent firearms” and was “perfectly acquainted with their construction.” At Selden’s request, he then proceeded with what the papers described as “a series of experiments touching the power of pistols with caps alone.”

  Opening the larger of the two cases, he removed a five-shot revolver with an eight-inch barrel and began to load it. Holding it up for the jury to see, he drove a ball into each chamber, then put the percussion caps in place. As he performed this procedure, he explained that the bullets were standard musket balls of the kind “used for government service” and the caps were “the strongest that can be got.” He used no gunpowder.

  Holding the gun in his right hand, Sam placed his left by the end of the barrel and aimed at the wall near Judge Kent, “who moved his seat to be a little more out of range.” Then, “as counsel, jury, spectators, and the bar all crowded to see the result,” he snapped off the five rounds.1 Though the caps exploded with a surprisingly loud report, they produced so little force that Sam was able to catch the balls in his bare hand as they emerged from the barrel.

  Next, after reloading the gun, he took aim and fired at a book that Dudley Selden had propped up on a table about twelve paces away. The bullet “made but very little impression, penetrating only nine leaves and indenting twenty-four.” Sam finished by repeating the experiments with the other gun, a short-barreled pocket pistol. The results were the same.

  Before Sam was dismissed, Selden asked him if there was any validity to the theory advanced by the prosecution that a bullet from one of his revolvers, discharged only by a percussion cap, could have produced the small hole in Adams’s skull.

  Sam addressed his reply directly to the jurors. “It is impossible for a ball to penetrate the head from one of these pistols if a cap alone is used,” he declared, “even if the pistol be held close to the head.”2

  Sam’s testimony was corroborated by a physician named C. B. Zabriskie, who, in addition to his medical activities, worked as a sales agent for Colt’s Patent Arms and ran the company store at 155 Broadway. Claiming that he had “fired off the pistols with a cap thousands of times in order to exhibit them,” Zabriskie said that he did “not suppose, from my knowledge of the human skull, that it could be penetrated by a ball propelled only by a cap. It is impossible that the skull could have been more than bruised.”3

  • • •

  The lucky spectators who man
aged to gain entrance that day had already been treated to a remarkable sight: a solemn courtroom “converted into a shooting-gallery” by Samuel Colt himself.4 As it happened, another, even more dramatic display was still to come.

  Recalled to the stand by Dudley Selden, Dr. C. R. Gilman—the witness who first suggested that the mysterious head wound was a bullet hole—made a surprising disclosure. Just hours before, on the order of the court, Samuel Adams’s cadaver had been removed from its grave and carried to a “small building inside the burial grounds,” where the head was “detached from the body” and reexamined by several of the medical experts who had already testified for the prosecution.

  As Gilman explained, he and his colleagues began by inspecting “the cavity of the skull.” They had found absolutely no evidence of a bullet—“no foreign substance there whatsoever,” as Gilman put it. Next, Gilman had stuck the little finger of one hand into the disputed wound. His pinkie had “passed easily into the hole and rested at the second joint.” He could feel that the wound had “ragged edges” and “was slightly oval—one part a very trifle larger than the other.” His investigation had caused him to revise his earlier opinion. “My conclusion is changed from what it was,” he declared. “I think it improbable that the hole was made by a ball of any description.”

  At the same time, he remained adamant that it was not caused by the murder weapon. “It is inconceivable to me how it is possible that such a hole could have been made by a hatchet.” Perhaps, he ventured, when Adams’s corpse was inside the crate, the skull had been punctured by a protruding nail. The shifting of the body as the box was “carried to Maiden Lane, put on board the vessel, and afterwards taken to the Dead House might have been sufficient to drive the nail through the head, and the hole might have been ground out larger and larger as the body moved around.”5